Living Wittily

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  • The first three bible commentaries I ever bought…..and read

    My biblical library has two or three commentaries on each Bible book – and on a number of the more substantial books, quite a bit more than three. As newer or better commentaries become available (though newer doesn't always mean better), I happily weed out those that have been superseded. Which keeps my biblical work up to date and keeps my library within the limits of the bookshelves. But in all the culls and clearouts, the new additions and the jettisoned, there are commentaries I'd never let go.

    The words 'benchmark', 'gold-standard', 'definitive' are too loosely thrown around by those who churn out the  publishers blurb, those literary spin doctors who endorse, commend and give borrowed authority. And sometimes they boldly say 'destined to become a classic'. Maybe so. But isn't a classic a book that has proved itself, that bears rereading, that has enduring value for its content and insights, that has the capacity to address universal human questions, or to transcend limits of time and idiom? Those amongst other critieria? So a 'classic in its field', say a classic commentary – what would that be? And which commentaries would any of us hold up as such an example?

    I'm happy to hear suggested classics from those who use commentaries. Meantime the reason for this post was a revisit I made to one of the first commentaries I ever bought…and read. Not all commentaries are readable. By their nature they are somewhere between a reference book to be consulted on a word, phrase, verse or section of text, or to be one of several perspectives being weighed as part of the comparing of evidence, perspective and interpretation that helps overcome our subjective often distorting individual preferences. That's why I have several commentaries on each biblical book. Not all from the same publisher; or the same theological perspective; or with the same exegetical approach.

    Caird And amongst them all are several I bought in my earliest years of Christian study. Not many of them would be called classics, benchmarks or definitive. At least not by others. But from the start of my Christian life, my spiritual development has always been closely indexed to my exegetical growing up. Taking text seriously, reading Scripture and hearing the Word of Christ opening up the Scriptures; trying to read the Bible from a heart informed by honest study.

    And in all those years some commentaries have been for me, and without the say-so of blurb writers, benchmarks, definitive of my approach to the text, and thus for me, classic commentaries. One of them is pictured here. Published in 1976, the year of my ordination. I paid £2.25 for it, in the John Smith University Bookshop of Stirling University. There isn't a single word of endorsement or publisher's blurb. So if the publisher were to reprint it (the only Amazon copy is currently priced at £46.25), I'd happily do a wee endorsement, thus:

    " This commentary is written with elegant brevity and an unembarrassed enjoyment in explaining ancient texts in accessible language. In 220 pages we have "multum in parvo" – Ephesians in 94 pages and 24 footnotes. Caird is allergic to academic jargon and is the kind of scholar who knows so much about the text and its world that he feels no need to prove it by killing the text under an avalanche of scholarly see how much I know footnotes. This is a book all scholars should read and reckon with – as an example of commentary writing that serves the Church well by serving the text faithfully."


    Or words to that effect! Wonder if Wipf and Stock would republish it? Think I'll suggest it……it's a classic.  

  • Sanctus! Sanctus! Sanctus! Jessye Norman on Youtube

    21YJJ1XQRFL._SL500_AA130_ I have a double CD of Jessye Norman (pictured). Had it for years and years – obviously so, I got it for my 40th birthday to go with my then state of the art sound system – long since superceded. On these worn but cherished CDs she sings Amazing Grace and The Holy City, both of them sung with a voice that is breathtaking in its control, passion and capacity to unsettle and then excite even the most complacent listener.

    But the track I remember first hearing on this album is the Sanctus from Gounod's St Cecilia Mass. And that was for me a musical watershed moment. I'd heard some classical sacred music before, but never, never, the overwhelming power of a voice that commanded such a profound and responsive attentiveness to the music and its content that it could only be described as a call to worship. From the brief introduction of the solo flute, to the crashing climax, and then the final quiet reprise of the flute solo, Jessye Norman's voice has made it impossible for me to read Isaiah 6 ever again, without hearing that majestic soprano voice compelling adoration and urging utter surrender to the one who is called, Holy! Holy! Holy!

    I've just listened to and watched the original performance (again) on YouTube. If you're jaded, complacent, anxious, living with limited horizons, feeling deprived of beauty and the energy to care about it; or if you are the opposite of all the foregoing, and life is good and getting gooder; or if today is neither up nor down and likely to be much like any other. Go listen, watch and see the world differently, and love the God who gives the gift of such music. You can find it on YouTube here.  And Amazon had 10 used copies when I checked last night.

  • One line (not online) Prayers II

    Preach200 Hope Rosemary and Stuart don't mind if I pick up their comments and respond in a full post.

    Rosemary isn't too impressed with John Wesley's prayer, "Lord let me not live to be useless." But in Wesley's defence Rosemary – he was the catalyst for a movement that has activism as one of its defining characteristics. And though some might argue that his evangelistic and organisational activism was driven by a clamouring ego, there is also a weight of evidence of something in John Wesley that is much more spiritually substantial. One of the key texts of Scripture on which Wesley's theology of Christian perfection drew deeply, was 2 Peter 1.4 which speaks of believers as participants in the divine nature. And the chain of consequences ends in verse 8 of that chapter with the desire to be kept 'from being ineffective and unproductive in [our] knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.'

    Miltonstrange300m Assuming Rosemary, you are referring to Milton's moving poem about his blindness, then yes,  the observation he makes to God "They also serve who only stand and wait", has equal claim to being a one line prayer that has its moments of exact appropriateness in all our lives. Though Milton himself was no passive quietist – his writing, social engagement and energetic pursuit of religious liberty, political activism and public service enabled him to live a life as full as that of any Wesley, his personality just as complex, his popularity just as mixed.

    But a comparison of prayers, their suitability or otherwise, invites some further reflection – on whether, or in what way someone, whether Wesley, Milton, Julian of Norwich or whoever can be "wrong" in content, intention or articulation of their prayer. Our personal circumstances, unique identity, our place in our family, neighbourhood or culture, the emotional and spiritual state we are in, our personal history – and much else, creates the person we are and out of whom come our prayers – praiseworthy and blameworthy, full formed and half formed, articulate and inarticulate, theologically correct and theologically dodgy, emotionally all over the place or emotionally integrated.

    So we pray. We pray out of who we are. And we trust God who knows the heart, to see our intent. I think it's one of the mercies of God that love covers a multitude of sins, that God knows our frame and remembers we are dust, and that in prevenient grace God is there before we ever open our mouths, and long afterwards.

    That said, some prayers are wrong. But what kind would they be?

    ………………………..

    Stuart asks in his comment about my own favourite one line prayer. I don't have one. There are a number I've used many times in those moments when they fit circumstance precisely, answer inner mood exactly, or say the truth as fully as I can bear it. Here's three of them:

    For all that is past, thanks – for all that is to come YES

                                                                                (Dag Hammarskjold)

    Thine eternity dost ever besiege us

                                                                                   (Helen Waddell)

    My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth, and followed Thee!

                                                                                    (Charles Wesley)

  • One line (not online) prayers

    Lord, let me not live to be useless.

                                                             (John Wesley)

    Grant me to recognise in
    other people, Lord God, the radiance of your own face.

                                                             (Teilhard de Chardin)

    Lord give me work till my
    life shall end, and life till my work is done.

                                                             (Based on Epitaph of writer, Winifred
    Holtby)

  • “Free our hearts to faith and praise.” Too good a hymn to forget.

    Preaching this morning on the wisdom that comes from above. How to live the life we are given wisely, faithfully and with a discerning heart. I Kings chapter 3 and James chapter 3. The last hymn, 'God of Grace and God of Glory, by Harry Emerson Fosdick, is one I don't suppose is sung in many places now. (how many of you even know it? – the words are reproduced below). It doesn't fit the taste, appetite or idiom of much modern praise music, and it isn't guitar friendly. A couple of times it fails on the gender inclusive standards – though I've little doubt if Fosdick had been writing today he would have been entirely sensitive to the need to negotiate the tensions between gender inclusive language and theological and linguistic integrity.

    140px-Fosdick_Time Opposed by Fundamentalists (and by more moderate voices) as a Liberal, there's little doubt Fosdick was disturbingly progressive in theology, an advocate of a social gospel, and an active advocate for modernist restatements of Christian faith. It's an often told story that sometimes on a Sunday when he was being lambasted from the pulpit by outspoken opponents, he was in his own church praying for those ministries and churches.

    At the end of our service this morning we will offer a responsive closing prayer using the last two lines of the second stanza: "Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the living of these days". The use throughout of the second person plural is crucial – this is a prayer of the Church. Several lines are one liner prayers, "Free our hearts to faith and praise", or brief petitions "Save us from weak resignation to the evils we deplore", and the two lines of our closing prayer. Fosdick's own autobiography, The Living of These Days, is a moving account of his spiritual pilgrimage.

    What is unmistakable on any fair reading of his own telling of his story, is the faith he had in the person of Jesus Christ, and in the Gospel as good news for humanity. Expressed through his passionate care for humanity locally and globally, and his fear of the foolishness of the mid-20th century trend towards living in a menacing world without moral reference to God as revealed in Jesus. The hymn was written in the 1930's, during the rise of Fascism and National Socialism in Europe, the Great Depression as the backdrop, and Fosdick having turned pacifist following his experiences in the First World War. So the hymn is dated in its idiom and context – not though, in its underlying yearning for a more securely founded way of living responsibly and faithfully these days. Wisdom and courage we still need; weak resignation we still need saving from; we are still rich in things and poor in soul; and more than ever we require to pray, "Free our hearts to faith and praise".      

    God of grace and God of glory,
    On Thy people pour Thy power.
    Crown Thine ancient church’s story,
    Bring her bud to glorious flower.
    Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
    For the facing of this hour 

    Lo! the hosts of evil ’round us,
    Scorn Thy Christ, assail His ways.
    From the fears that long have bound us,
    Free our hearts to faith and praise.
    Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
    For the living of these days.

    Cure Thy children’s warring madness,
    Bend our pride to Thy control.
    Shame our wanton selfish gladness,
    Rich in things and poor in soul.
    Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
    Lest we miss Thy kingdom’s goal.

    Set our feet on lofty places,
    Gird our lives that they may be,
    Armored with all Christ-like graces,
    In the fight to set men free.
    Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
    That we fail not man nor Thee.

    Save us from weak resignation,
    To the evils we deplore.
    Let the search for Thy salvation,
    Be our glory evermore.
    Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
    Serving Thee Whom we adore.


  • The Sisters of Sinai and Professor William Robertson Smith

    5156Ns1EPNL._SL500_AA240_ Sheila's reading Sisters of Sinai by Janet Soskice. More about her in an earlier post I did here. Part of the story of these two remarkable women brings them into contact with Professor William Robertson Smith, a young professor of biblical studies at the Free Church College, Aberdeen, in the 1870's. His critical approach to biblical studies (rejection of Moses' authoriship of Deuteronomy for example), led to his deposition in 1881 from his professorship, a tragedy that ranks high on the list of religious own goals in Scotland.

    Smith eventually moved to Cambridge where he encountered these two sisters, pioneers in the discovery and transcription of important ancient biblical and extra-biblical manuscripts. Robertson Smith died relatively young (48 years) of tuberculosis. Once or twice I've visited his grave in the little graveyard in Keig, Aberdeenshire, a peaceful, shaded incline facing out across the shire. During his trial before the church courts he made a now famous affirmation of what he believed to be the nature and authority of Scripture. It didn't satisfy his examiners' and critics' much more conservative convictions on the nature and authority of the Bible, though what he says is deeply indebted to the Reformers' theology of the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit as the sine qua non of biblical interpretation. But his defence remains one of the most eloquent and sincere statements of believing criticism in which faith and thought are held in a legitimate tension of spiritual integrity and intellectual honesty.200px-WilliamRobertsonSmith

    "If I am asked why I receive Scripture as the Word of God and the only
    perfect rule of faith and life, I answer with all the Fathers of the Protestant
    Church, because the Bible is the only record of the redeeming love of God,
    because in the Bible alone I find God drawing near to men in Christ Jesus and
    declaring to us in Him His will for our salvation. And this record I know to be
    true by the witness of His Spirit in my heart, whereby I am assured that none
    other than God Himself is able to speak such words to my soul."

    Smith,
    W. R., Answer to the Form of Libel now
    before the Free Church Presbytery of     Aberdeen (Edinburgh, 1878).

    ………………………………………..

    You can find out more about Smith on this website devoted to him. It contains the full text of a recent Aberdeen PhD which was supervised by Prof. William Johnstone one of our leading authorities on Robertson Smith and editor of a fine collection of essays about him.

  • Reflections on miraculously returned John Denver CDs!

    28_bg The year before he was killed in a crash in an experimental plane, I went to John Denver's concert in Edinburgh Usher Hall, 1996. Along with the Joan Baez concert in Glasgow around the same time, it remains one of the most memorable live music experiences of my life. One singer, two guitars and the best part of three hours of song, conversation, laughter and by a process of emotional assimilation a shared love of humanity, our world and all the possibilities of a life enriched by compassion, humour and eyes open to the gift that life is. Being there was a privilege, and if he had been there for more than one evening I'd have gone for a repeat performance – because he was a consummate performer who respected, liked and connected with his audiences.

    Over the years I've patiently and heedlessly endured the raised eyebrows, knowing smirks, pitying shakes of the head and general dismissiveness of many who wondered about my idiosyncratic enthusiasm for a smiling bespectacled country singer with a page boy haircut and granny glasses. Don't care. John Denver's music has been a source of serious reflection, more or less innocent fun, and humanely conceived lyrics of political protest and articulate environmentalism since I was a teenager and his music was produced on that cutting edge technology called vinyl. And anyway, who else in the 1970's was singing about overharvesting the seas, the pollution of the oceans, (the track calypso is dedicated to Jacques Cousteau), the environmental impact of forest stripping, and the irreversible loss of birds, animals and flowers due to consummate consumer greed? Some others, but not many of them so persistently. Why tell you all this?

    21M17WYK6JL._SL500_AA130_ Just recovered three CD's that I was sure had simply vanished without trace into the CD warehouses of those who borrow on a permanent basis. One of them is my favourite album which I still have on vinyl – Windsong. Just spent an hour listening to it and thinking of music as an emotional holiday, a gift that takes us out of ourselves and yet can also take us deeper into ourselves. I suppose much of this album  drew on early New Age imagery and discourse – but the wider application of lyrics about friendship as the gift that dispels loneliness, about the search for who we are and where in the world we fit in, and about that world as fragile, finite gift to be cherished. Denver was all but pantheist in his worldview; but much of what he sings calls us to a responsible cherishing of our earth, and an underlying optimism about the future that as a Christian I find more securely rooted in a doctrine of creation and a redemptive eschatology.

    Denver was heavily involved in global humanitarian work, particularly on behalf of charities tackling world hunger; his song 'I want to live' became an anthem which expresses the human rights issues that underlie the economic imbalance between the developed world and the two thirds world. There isn't the hard edged rage of the prophet Amos, but there is passionate protest in the plea of the hungry as sung by Denver:

    There are children raised in sorrow

    on a scorched and barren plain

    there are children raised beneath the golden sun

    There are children of the water,

    children of the sand

    and they cry out through the universe

    their voices raised as one

    I want to live, I want to grow

    I want to see, I want to know

    I want to share what I can give

    I want to be, I want to live

    Have you gazed out on the ocean

    seen the breaching of a whale?

    Have you watched the dolphins frolic in the foam?

    Have you heard the song the humpback hears

    five hundred miles away

    Telling tales of ancient history

    of passages and home

    I want to live, I want to grow

    I want to see, I want to know

    I want to share what I can give

    I want to be, I want to live

    For the worker and warrior, the lover and the liar

    For the native and the wanderer in kind

    For the maker and the user and the mother and her son

    We are standing all together

    face to face and arm in arm

    We are standing on the treshold of a dream

    No more hunger, no more killing

    no more wasting life away

    It is simply an idea

    and I know its time has come

    I want to live, I want to grow

    I want to see, I want to know

    I want to share what I can give

    I want to be…..


  • Julian of Norwich and our devotional canon

    Hand1 I learned that love was our Lord's meaning.
    And I saw for certain, both here and elsewhere,
    that before ever he made us, God loved us;
    and that his love has never slackened,
    nor ever shall.

    In this love all his works have been done,
    and in this love he has made everything serve us;
    and in this love our life is everlasting.
    Our beginning was when we were made,
    but the love in which he made us
    never had beginning.
    In it we have our beginning.
    All this we shall see in God forever.
    May Jesus grant this.

    (Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love.  (1342-c.1416)

    Julian's Revelations of Divine Love is amongst the half dozen or so classic texts of Christian Spirituality that I've read and pondered regularly for years. Call it my devotional canon. Such reading isn't informational but formational and transformational; these texts, along with Scripture, nourish the theological imagination, sustain spiritual passion, recall dissipated affections to a new focus, touch us in those deep recesses of love and hopefulness about ourselves, that only grace can galvanise and organise.

    Sometimes folk ask how I get the time to do all the reading I do. Here's part of the answer. How we love God and follow faithfully after our Lord will be different for each of us, as different as we are from each other. Not everyone finds reading brings them closer to God – though I think more could. But I am persuaded (I love the AV rendering of Paul's certainties!) – that good pastoral care includes amongst its goals enabling and encouraging a community to think, reflect, read and learn together of the wisdom to live for Christ faithfully and well. Many don't read deeply and slowly because no one has ever helped them make the connection between such reading and the way they view the world, their faith and the essential connections between our understanding of the world, our knowledge of God, our prayers, and the quality of our Christian faithfulness.

    Time for reading, time for work, time for the people at the heart of our lives, time for sleep, time for serving others, time for music, exercise, eating, TV, surfing – but in the end much of what we do with time comes down to choices, preferences, priorities and life circumstances. Some of the great Christian spiritual teachers had a fixed habit of 15 minutes a day for slow reading of classic spiritual texts. Forget The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and The Purpose Driven Life. I've often enough disparaged such culturally determined life management books – at times unfairly. They do what they do. But when it comes to the necessary deepening of our relationship to God, a surer less partial grasp of our faith, a more reflectively compassionate looking out on the world, a more cherishing attitude to the Body of Christ, a more penetrating analysis of our time and place in the purposes of God in a world like ours – when it comes to all that, such books don't do what needs to be done.

    These Christian spiritual teachers approached their reading of classic texts with a 'give us this day our daily bread' urgency. They knew they needed nourishment, strength, energy, and they felt and befriended their hunger as a necessary inner reminder that they are not self-sustaining, or self-propelled or capable of growth without food. Food for the heart, the imagination, the conscience, the mind – food for thought, food for energy, food for strength, and thus, food to live. And for a quarter of an hour a day, week on week, month on month, year on year, they made time to slow down and wait in the company of Christ, learning from the cloud of witnesses what it is to be loved by God and to love God. And in that Love to understand more what it meant for them to be called to be part of God's mission to redeem and renew, to reconcile and restore a fallen but God-loved creation.

    So, Julian again:

    "In this vision he showed me a little thing, the size
    of a hazelnut, and it was round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought "What may this be?" And it was generally answered thus:
    "It is all that is made." I marvelled how it might last, for it seemed it might suddenly have
    sunk into nothing because of its littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: "It lasts and ever shall, because God loves it."

  • For the beauty [and fun] of the earth… thanks be to God.

    Recent visit to the People's Palace where we took some photos. A recent post became an essay on sectarianism, social justice and the coloured history of Glasgow. Here's a couple of the photos – it should be clear from the title of this post which refers to beauty……

    Apart from the fact they were taken in the same place, the connection is my father's wide and eclectic horticultural skill. He grew cacti and succulents as a hobby, and introduced me to the beauty of the Himalayan Mountain flower, the Hibiscus. I enjoyed a meander around this mini-sub tropical garden and encountering both – brought back memories of helping to riddle leaf mould, peat, sand and soil in varied measure to make up the requisite compost for my dad – whose compost recipes involved quantity measurement as finely calibrated and as securely kept as the recipe for Irn Bru.

    DSCN0896

    Me with cactus growing out of my head – deliberate pose adopted during an attack of childishness.

    DSCN0902

    These are amongst the most beautiful flowers in the world – way ahead of orchids for me, though the flower only lasts a day or two.

  • Heaven does not laugh loud but it laughs last….(P T Forsyth)

    My thanks to Jason who brought this quotation to my attention – it provides more than enough thought for the day.

    Heaven does not laugh loud but it laughs last – when all the world will laugh in its light. It is a smile more immeasurable than the ocean and more deep; it is an irony gentler and more patient than the bending skies, the irony of a long love and the play of its sure mastery; it is the smile of the holy in its silent omnipotence of mercy.
    (P T Forsyth, The Justification of God, page 206)